In the summer of 2019, I stood in the lobby of Shiseido’s Global Innovation Center (GIC) in Yokohama’s Minato Mirai district, surrounded by meticulously designed exhibition spaces, with a faint fragrance in the air that I couldn’t quite identify.

This was Shiseido’s R&D facility opened in 2019, and the entire building itself was like a brand manifesto. But what truly made me pause wasn’t the architectural design or the high-tech equipment in those laboratories.

It was something the tour guide said: “Shiseido doesn’t chase trends. We pursue style.”

At first glance, this sounds like marketing rhetoric—the kind of slogan written on page one of brand manuals that no one takes seriously.

But after walking through GIC, I realized this wasn’t a slogan—it was a methodology.

Shiseido was founded in 1872—the fifth year of the Meiji era, when Fukuhara Arinobu opened Japan’s first Western-style pharmacy in Tokyo’s Ginza. Nearly 150 years later, this company is still alive, and not just alive—it’s thriving with a strong sense of presence. The average lifespan of Japanese companies is about 30 years, even shorter globally. Companies that survive a century are anomalies; those that survive a century while maintaining clear brand recognition are rare species.

Why?

GIC’s exhibitions offered a concrete clue: Shiseido’s history isn’t a series of “successfully chasing trends” stories, but rather a series of “persisting with our own aesthetic judgment” stories. From early pharmaceuticals to post-war popularization of cosmetics, to 1980s internationalization, to recent tech-beauty innovations—at every stage, Shiseido’s strategy wasn’t “what others are doing, we’ll do too,” but “what we believe beauty should be.”

The difference between trends and style becomes very concrete here.

Trends are externally driven. Their logic is: “Whatever the market wants now, I’ll provide.” This isn’t a bad strategy, but it has a structural problem—you’re always chasing. Catching up means passing grade; falling behind means elimination. More troubling, trends are cyclically perishable—this year’s hit becomes next year’s inventory.

Style is internally driven. Its logic is: “I am who I am, so I do what I do.” This sounds romantic, but actually requires extremely high self-awareness and discipline. Because you must say no to every “follow the trend and make money” temptation, then continue persisting through every “persistence doesn’t guarantee returns” moment.

Shiseido chose the latter. Over nearly 150 years, it hasn’t been without mistakes or detours. But its core logic has never changed: we define beauty; the market doesn’t define us.

This reminds me of my experience as a brand consultant.

Taiwan enterprises—especially SMEs and startups—face a most common branding problem that isn’t “not trying hard enough,” but “trying too hard to chase trends.”

I’ve seen too many cases like this: when AI gets hot this year, they rebrand as “AI-driven”; when ESG was popular last year, they proclaimed themselves “sustainable enterprises”; when NFTs were trending the year before, they launched “digital collectible strategies.” Every move is proactive, every move responds to the market. But looking back three years later, what is this company really?

Everything, so nothing at all.

I once discussed brand positioning with a client’s founder who spent forty minutes telling me about his product’s “industry-first” features. After listening, I asked one question: “If you removed all these features, what would be left of your brand?”

He was stunned.

This is the trap of trend thinking. You think you’re building a brand, but you’re actually building a list of trend-tied features. When trends change, the list becomes obsolete.

Back to Shiseido’s story.

GIC has an exhibition area displaying Shiseido’s advertisements and product designs from different eras. You can clearly see an aesthetic thread running throughout—clean, refined, with a certain restrained elegance. Posters from the 1920s placed next to 2019 product packaging don’t feel jarring at all.

This is the power of style. It’s not static, not “what it looked like a hundred years ago is what it looks like now.” It’s a consistency that evolves—the underlying aesthetic judgment remains unchanged, but the expression updates with the times.

This follows the same logic as personal branding.

When managing my own content, I constantly face this question. Should an article ride trending topics? Should a theme chase algorithms? The answer is almost always no. Not out of pretension, but because I’m very clear—attention gained from riding trends comes fast and goes fast too. The readers who stay are attracted by your perspectives and style, not by your speed in following trends.

But I must honestly say, choosing style over trends comes at a high cost.

Shiseido can do this because it has nearly 150 years of accumulation and global market scale. For individuals or small businesses to do this requires not courage, but patience.

Building style is an extremely slow process. You might write articles on the same type of topics for three consecutive years with almost no change in readership. You might insist on writing long-form content when everyone else is doing short videos. You might have to explain in every brand meeting why you won’t follow the latest marketing trends.

Every one of these moments is a test.

My own experience: style’s rewards are delayed, but once established, its moat runs deeper than any trend strategy. Because anyone can chase trends, but only you can define your style. When others ask “what’s trending now,” you no longer need to ask—because you are your own trend.

When leaving GIC, the wind off Yokohama Port was strong.

I recalled a phrase I’d read somewhere: “Fashion fades, style is eternal.” This is usually given as fashion advice, but it’s actually a survival strategy.

Whether it’s a nearly 150-year-old Japanese company or an individual brand still figuring out positioning, the logic is the same—you don’t need to catch every wave, you just need to know where you stand.

Waves will pass. You won’t.

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